


All the Faith That's Left (The Aziraphale Remix)

by AstroGirl



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Angst, Comfort, Fallen Aziraphale, M/M, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-14
Updated: 2020-10-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:40:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26446474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: How do you have faith in anyone, once you've been abandoned by God?
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 18
Kudos: 51
Collections: Remix Revival 2020 Madness





	All the Faith That's Left (The Aziraphale Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KannaOphelia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KannaOphelia/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Not so bad when you get used to it](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20517713) by [KannaOphelia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KannaOphelia/pseuds/KannaOphelia). 
  * In response to a prompt by [KannaOphelia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KannaOphelia/pseuds/KannaOphelia) in the [remixmadness2020](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/remixmadness2020) collection. 



> A Remix Madness offering, because I couldn't possibly resist! Rated Teen for non-explicit sex and swearing.

Angels don't Fall. Not anymore. Of all the things Aziraphale has feared, he has never feared that.

He failed all his duties in the Garden, and he didn't Fall. He gave away his sword, and did not Fall. He colluded with his Adversary, and if Gabriel and the hosts of Heaven never noticed, surely the Almighty did. She is omniscient, omnipotent. She saw, he is certain of it. And She did nothing.

He thwarted the Great Plan, and didn't Fall. He defected to Earth, said "our side" to a demon, lent that demon his body to walk the sacred halls of Heaven. He made an archangel miracle him a towel. There was no transformation, no agony, no fiery plummet.

He severed his ties with Heaven entirely, turned his back on the lot of them, and _he did not Fall_.

So how does it make sense that this, _this_ , is what does it, this simple, harmless, beautiful physical act?

Maybe it's coincidence. Maybe six months -- or six thousand years -- of paperwork finally came through. Maybe, of all the things he's done, this is the only one anyone in Heaven was able to imagine in advance and decree an automatic punishment for. Maybe it is simply the proverbial final straw.

He doesn't know. All he knows is, one moment he is in Crowley's arms, sweaty and sated and full of joy, and the next everything is fire, and falling, and pain.

 _Or maybe_ , he thinks then, _God is just a complete bastard_.

And it's that thought, not the burning, or the changes to his corporation and his essence, or even landing face-first and screaming in Hell, that makes him believe he is truly a demon now.

**

They're not kind to him, in Hell. Of course they're not. They're demons. But that doesn't necessarily follow, does it? 

"Crowley," he calls out, through the pain and the confusion and the despair, as they kick him and taunt him and pull at the dirty gray feathers -- pigeon feathers? -- that sprout where his hair was meant to be.

It's hard to think. His mind is full of flame and sulfur. But someone should be here, he's certain of it. Someone always comes to rescue him. "Crowley?"

**

He can hear voices. He's being moved somewhere. He ought to try to concentrate. To attempt to understand what's happening to him.

"Oh, there he is!"

He knows that voice. He'd know it anywhere, even in Hell. It sounds relieved.

Oh, good. Everything will be all right now. They'll get this... this little misunderstanding cleared up. Soon they'll be back in bed together. With champagne and chocolates, and Crowley will thread his fingers again through Aziraphale's...

Oh. No. His hair is gone. His hair is all gone, and Crowley is saying something else now. 

"Come on, guys. Can't do better as a peace offering than this, can you? First angel to Fall since... Well, hard to say how long, isn't it, since time hadn't exactly been invented yet. Long time, though. Long, long time. Pretty impressive, you gotta admit."

"Crowley?" His voice is a strange, rasping coo. It scarcely sounds like him at all.

He thinks Crowley's eyes dart towards him for a moment, but behind the sunglasses it's impossible to tell. 

"Don't gotta admit anything," says a demon from the back of what seems to be a rapidly gathering crowd. Hastur? Yes, there he is. Aziraphale -- is he still allowed to call himself Aziraphale? -- recognizes the toad, the sullenly cruel expression. 

Beelzebub steps forward. "We thought you two were..." She makes a revolted face. "...friendzzz."

Crowley lets out a little scoffing noise. The familiarity of it does something to Aziraphale's fluttery pigeon heart. "Whatever's happened, I'm still a demon. We don't _have_ friends. Sure, he's, eeehhh, I dunno, interesting, I guess. Fun to tempt and stuff. Good taste in wine. But I wouldn't say _friends_."

 _Angel_ , he'd gasped in Aziraphale's ear, into Aziraphale's mouth. _Angel, angel, angel._ It had sounded like an endearment. Aziraphale had always believed it to be an endearment. "Crowley..." he says again. It's all he ever seems to be able to say, in Hell.

"Shut up," Crowley hisses. 

"What izz it you _want_?" says Beelzebub. "In return for this..." She looks at Aziraphale with as much disdain as he's ever seen anyone look at a pigeon scrabbling after garbage on the street. "...favor you've supposedly done us."

"Told you. My job back. It's boring up there with no assignments. Never really wanted to quit in the first place, you know. Why else do you think I tried to stop the apocalypse? Just wanted to keep doing what I was doing. On Earth. " He spreads out his hands. Aziraphale remembers that gesture. _How long have we been friends?_ , it asked him once. "What can I say? I like it there."

"And that izzz all?"

"That's it. Although..."

"Oh, now we come to it," says Hastur. "Here we go."

"Was just gonna say, I _could_ take this one back up with me. If you like. Show him all the temptation ropes. I'm sure he'd be able to make himself useful. He knows Earth almost as well as I do, not to mention having all the inside info on everything Heaven's been up to there for the last six thousand years. Bringing him to you and being able to put him right to work... C'mon, guys. That's gotta be worth a re-hire. Plus, let's admit it. You _really_ want to have the two of us on your side."

Beelzebub looks at Aziraphale thoughtfully. He closes his eyes. He can't look at her. Can't look at Crowley. 

_How long have we been friends?_

_We're on_ our _side._

Demons lie.

No. Crowley doesn't. Not like that. He has faith in Crowley. Faith as deep as he has in God.

Had in God.

 _Had_.

The rest of the conversation barely registers. Even Crowley's grasp on his arm as he leads him back to Earth feels faint and unreal. 

**

"Angel? _Angel?_ "

Aziraphale blinks. He's... He's in the bookshop? In the bookshop, on the sofa. He thinks he remembers coming in here. It's all a bit of a blur, to be honest. 

He pinches the fabric of the blanket he's sitting on between his fingers. The strange familiarity of it makes him want to cry. He's home. He is home, and nothing is right anymore at all.

"Angel?"

"Don't call me that!"

Crowley reels back. "Sorry. Sorry, sorry, right. Wasn't thinking." 

Crowley's fingers are touching him now. Touching his face, touching his... Well. Not his hair. Eventually he's going to remember what he has there now. Will he be able to gain enough control over his corporation to replace it? Will he have to wear a hat?

He turns his face away from Crowley.

"Aziraphale," Crowley says, and he sounds... pained? Aziraphale can't even tell, anymore. He thought he could read all Crowley's emotions, once.

"Perhaps you shouldn't call me that, either," he says. There's no coo in his voice now, but the bitterness in it is every bit as new. "Do you give me a new name, since you're apparently my supervisor now, or am I permitted to pick one? Is there paperwork?"

"Listen to me," Crowley says. "You're still you. All right? Trust me, angel, I _know_."

"You said it again."

"Fuck!" Crowley's fingers perform a frenzied scrabble through his hair. Why does _he_ get to keep his hair? Why aren't there scales there? Oh, but the scales are elsewhere, aren't they? He remembers. Remembers touching them with his fingers, with his tongue.

"I'd rather not, just now, if it's all the same to you," Aziraphale says. "Fuck, that is. Considering what happened the last time."

Oh dear. Crowley looks like he's trying not to cry, behind his glasses. Should that still hit Aziraphale like a sword through the heart?

"You can't Fall twice for it, though, can you?" No matter what his face looks like, Crowley's tone is gentle now. His voice might belong to an entirely different being than the one who treated him as a chip to bargain with in Hell.

"No," he says. "But I suppose once was enough for you, wasn't it?"

Crowley flinches back as if he's been struck. "You think I _meant_ that to happen? Those things I said... Ang-- Aziraphale, I was trying to get you _out_ of there!"

He cannot handle this anymore. He _cannot_.

He squeezes his eyes shut. It doesn't stop the tears from coming. "I know, Crowley," he says. It isn't quite a whimper. Almost, but not quite. "I _know_. I know who you are, I know what we did was... was real and beautiful and good, I know you're my _friend_ , Crowley, I _know_. I... I _should_ know. I should know it." There is a hand on his shoulder. He feels like he ought to throw it off. 

He lets it stay. "Why don't I know it?" he finishes, his voice little more than a whisper now, and he opens his eyes.

With the hand not gripping Aziraphale's shoulder, Crowley takes his glasses off and sets them on the back of the sofa. His eyes are fully yellow, and as vulnerable as Aziraphale has ever seen them. "I sold myself back to Hell for you," he says, and there is no anger in it. No recrimination. No manipulation. It is a bare, simple fact.

"Perhaps you shouldn't have."

Crowley begins to make an angry, protesting sound.

"They took it from me," Aziraphale says. The tears are running down his face now. It's ridiculous. What point is there in weeping? Demons aren't supposed to cry.

"Took what?" Crowley says, wiping Aziraphale's cheeks dry with his fingers.

"I don't know." Aziraphale scrubs at his own cheek, but the feel of Crowley's touch lingers. "My ability to believe in anything, I think."

"That doesn't go away when you become a demon." Crowley is looking deeply into his eyes now, and his gaze is full of... of... "Trust me," he says. His fingers comb through the feathers on Aziraphale's head as if they're soft, as if they're beautiful, as if they don't belong to vermin. "I _know_."

Aziraphale draws in a long, shuddering breath. "I'm sorry," he says. "You shouldn't have had to... Not for me."

"'Course I did. Couldn't leave you down there, could I? Aziraphale, listen, I know it's awful for you, believe me, nobody knows it more, but it gets better. You get used to it, I promise. It'll be okay. For both of us. It'll be just like old times." He rests a hand on Aziraphale's leg, rubbing warm, comforting circles into his thigh. "A few temptations, a lot of taking credit for things, a lot of slacking off. Only easier, because they probably still think they can't hurt me, and they might not be too sure about you. They won't want to push their luck." He smiles, a small, heartbreaking smile. "We'll be on the same side, this time. We can be whatever we like together." The smile falters, melts into something more uncertain. "That is... whatever you like. If you like. If you still trust me."

He wants to trust Crowley. Wants to cling to him and never let him go. Instead, he only permits himself to touch Crowley's hand, where it rests on his thigh. "How can it possibly be the same? I'm not... I'm not the person I was. Nothing will ever be the same for me. I've been cut off from Heaven..."

"Who needs 'em!" 

"Cut off from God."

"Her loss." Crowley's hand turns palm-up beneath his, fingers twining with his. "One hundred percent Her loss."

"Cut off from love..."

"You're not." Crowley scowls, then clasps his hand harder and raises it to his lips. "You're _not_." He says it fiercely, and with an astonishing certainty.

They haven't said the word "love" to each other. Not even in the throes of passion. It had not seemed like word a demon could accept.

"I'm not?" Something is stirring in Aziraphale's heart. Something he'd always thought was purely angelic.

Crowley kisses his hand. "You're not." Kisses his wrist. "You're _not_."

"Crowley..." He's crying again. Oh, this would have been embarrassing when he was an angel, never mind now that's he's meant to be _demonic_.

Crowley lowers their hands, still clasped together, leans in, and kisses his lips. "You're not." He kisses him again. "You're not." He kisses Aziraphale's cheek, his forehead, his mouth again. "You're _not_."

"I'm not," Aziraphale says. And he can feel the truth of it, not in the ethereal realm of angelic senses, but in heat of Crowley's lips, in the grip of his hand, in fervor of his words.

"Do you believe me, angel? Say you believe me."

 _Not an angel_ , he thinks. 

And then he thinks, _Who says? Who gets to tell me what I am?_

He has an answer to that. It's looking at him now, with an expression of steadfast hope and desperate, selfless love. The Almighty never looked at him like that. No one in Heaven ever did, not from the moment of his creation.

Does he, in fact, feel any less love than he ever did?

"I believe you," he says. "I believe you. Everyone else has let me down, haven't they? God, Heaven. But you... You're the only one who ever raised me up."

"Yeah. Oh, yeah. Ditto." Crowley's arms are around him now. Perhaps it ought to feel wrong, dangerous: a snake embracing a bird. But it's still only them. "Me, too," says Crowley, and is he crying? His eyes aren't made for tears, but his shoulders are heaving and there is a hitch in his breath. "Aziraphale. I thought I'd lost you. Again. Aziraphale. _Aziraphale._ "

"It's all right," he says, gathering Crowley close. "It's all right. That is still my name. And I'm still here. Thank you for that, Crowley. Thank you."

"Anytime, angel," Crowley says, his breath sighing warm against Aziraphale's neck, and that's all right, too. It _is_. 

He may not be God's angel anymore, but no one can ever stop him from being Crowley's.


End file.
